Most Australians happy with government watching social media to stop terror: poll

Four out of five Australians say they are "comfortable" with government agencies monitoring social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook to detect possible terrorist attacks, a survey has found.

The poll found that Australians are far more dubious, however, about social media monitoring by the private sector for the purpose of targeting advertising or offers: just 27 per cent said they felt comfortable with this.

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Police and ASIO spying on social media

ASIO, the AFP and other agencies are spying on Australians' social media - and the people approve. David Wroe explains why.

The survey, carried out by Newspoll for the US-based technology giant Unisys, comes amid heightened concern about the use of social media by Islamic extremists to recruit followers and encourage and co-ordinate attacks.

A recent study by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute found that four out of five known Australian extremists had a social media presence.

Extremists are using sites such as Twitter to encourage and plan terror attacks.

Agencies such as the Australian Federal Police and ASIO are known to pay close attention to the social media activity of extremists and their networks, particularly as it plays a growing role in terrorist activity.

Nigel Phair, a former AFP officer now with Canberra University's Centre for Internet Safety, said monitoring social media was a critical part of security agencies' work, which included going undercover posing as paedophiles or terrorists.

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Much of the methodology on counter-terrorism had come out of experience in combating online paedophilia, given the similarities in how young targets were "groomed", he said.

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"The internet is a public place and they should be policing it, provided they do it lawfully and ethically themselves. Extremists as we've seen are using it very effectively and the police have got to be equally adept if they're going to be effective in that environment."

As well as simply scanning the Facebook or Twitter pages of known suspects, agencies use analysis software that looks for patterns in data gathered from networks around known suspects. These include programs such as IBM's i2 intelligence analysis platform and software made by the firms such as Palantir and the Wynyard Group.

Wynyard's communications director Emma Jackson said such programs sorted out people of concern from those who might just be associated with a terrorist by accident.

"There's just so much data out there and it's well-known extremists and new generation terrorist groups do utilise social media as command control platforms to recruit these young people," she said.

"They're hiding in such huge mountains of noise that the internet creates that essentially law enforcement agencies have to find what's important within all that data. So they need to the tools to do that and target the right people.

"What tools like ours do is assist in quickly eliminating the individuals who aren't of interest."

An AFP spokesman said: "For operational reasons, it is not appropriate for the AFP to comment specifically on investigations, matters of intelligence, or operational methodology."